The Weight of a Millstone
On the Protection of Sex Abusers and Child Molesters by Church Leaders
And calling to him a child, [Jesus] put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever scandalizes one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. “Woe to the world for scandals! For it is necessary that scandals come, but woe to the one by whom the scandal comes!” - Matthew 18:2-7 ESV with my emendations
Scandalize—to do something that people find very shocking; Scandal—behavior or an event that people think is morally or legally wrong and that causes public feelings of shock or anger. - Oxford American Dictionary
Tuesday is the day of the week that I pray for the global church. (I am looking for no acclaim for this. I only recently adopted the practice.) I scanned Christian news headlines for anything that would help me focus my prayer on what was pressing. The top story:
“Churches Threaten to Withhold Funds Over Southern Baptist Response to Abuse Inquiry”
While the real roots of this story start years ago in the evil hearts of the depraved, it gained national attention when the Houston Chronicle published an exposé about many years and cases of sex abuse in Southern Baptist churches by Southern Baptist ministers and often covered up by Southern Baptist leaders. The Christianity Today headline above is a real-time look into what I too often disregard as stuff of pure history—leaders using power to maintain power.
I’m not one who thinks that there are great skeletons in the closets of the members of the SBC Executive Committee (at least not in most of the closets), but I’m sure that a decision to waive attorney-client privilege to a third-party investigation (which is what the money-withholding churches are asking for) would have deleterious effects on people they have decided to protect, which could cause all types of schisms in the convention1. Who knows how deep this will go when the doors are unlocked, as I imagine they will be. (Since the time of my writing this, the SBC EC has voted to waive attorney-client privilege.)
So, yesterday morning at 6am, laying down in my spare bedroom as usual, I prayed about this. I asked that God would give wisdom, humility, and courage to everyone involved, victim and victimizer, that those responsible would have the faith to do what’s right and that truth would be the path trod. I also prayed that the Lord would grant our churches a real repentance (2 Timothy 2:25), which I find myself praying continually these days.
I also, later, prayed for the miracle of church unity (I still believe in such things: both miracles and church unity) among all the split denominations in the world, so that we could be one again (John 17:22-23), even protestants with Catholics. It felt silly until I remembered God has been rumored to do things quite extraordinary.
But I never expected that I would find unity so quickly:
“More Than 200,000 Minors Abused by Clergy in France Since 1950, Report Estimates”
Of course I had heard about the Catholic sex abuse scandal before—its only under-rock-dwellers who haven’t. The now-made-into-a-major-motion-picture reporting of the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe was a huge catalyst to the worldwide recognition of this unspeakable corruption. What they continue to discover is that it’s hard to find many native, middle-aged Bostonian men who weren’t victims of this abuse in some way.
What is perhaps the most sinister and detestable aspect of all of this, protestant and Catholic alike, including the wretchedly high number of other cases in other denominations, is the church leaders who covered them up and let the abusers continue in ministry. In all of these stories there are people who knew and who kept the secret. Now they’re all scandals. And that’s the problem.
Christian, if you thought things would be different on this path, I’m sorry you were misled. The Bible warns us time, times, and half a time again that the Valley of the Shadow of Death does not appear deadly to everyone. To some it appears as fields of honeysuckles and wheat and springs of fresh water. It seems a good place to turn aside and refresh oneself. It’s a good place to establish a little house on the prairie. Things are so good that following the narrow-way Shepherd, who says he’s taking us to a better place even though the road is hard and the food he gives is no longer exciting, is starting to appear a little clueless. The road is so long and hot and we’re tired and the place we just came from had a lot to offer.
This is what makes life to us both open and opaque. If Jesus is so good, why do those close to him choose to set up a home in the valley? “Lord, I understand that sin is tempting and many mighty saints have fallen to its seduction, but how do you let your church do this?”
But that’s the entire Christian life. It’s the fight to trust the Shepherd on the pilgrim way no matter what anyone else is doing. It’s to look through his eyes at the beautiful fields of the valley and see that they are just a covering for wickedness and injustice. And the real truth is that the Shepherd is the king of it all, and he’s coming to bring justice against the evil valley dwellers, spiritual and physical alike, and reappropriate his lands.
He went through one town and village after another, teaching and making his way to Jerusalem. “Lord,” someone asked him, “are only a few people going to be saved?” He said to them, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and won’t be able (Luke 13:22-24)
Definitions change. “Dude, that is sick!” no longer means “Delicately dressed man, that thing is diseased!” Perhaps, in this instance, for the better. But language has power. When it changes, it changes how we think. The words we choose to describe ideas begin to shape our reality for better or worse. I wonder if this is one of the capacities that remain in our distorted image-of-Godness, our ability to imitate the God who created everything by his Word.
The definition of “scandal” has undergone a significant change since Matthew translated Jesus’s Aramaic words, from the teaching I cited at the beginning, with the Greek words skandalizō and skandalon. Jesus meant a scandal as: a rock in someone’s path that would cause them to stumble, a temptation to sin. To scandalize someone meant to tempt them to sin or fall from the faith. It morphed into the form of Latin’s scandalum with a similar meaning, but as it made its way into Old French and Middle English, it started to take on more of the meaning of an action that brings a bad reputation, especially on the church. But now its meaning has been ground down so that it weighs almost nothing: it’s an action which brings shock because of its culturally-defined inappropriateness. The word is now suited to our world where a universal understanding of right and wrong is exchanged for a simple matter of what one likes. I am scandalized if you do something that shocks me because I think it’s unthinkable and looks bad to others.
Today when we use the word scandal to describe the sexual abuse evil in the church, it becomes a joke. It’s a story fit for the tabloids, and newspapers if it’s lucky. Everyone wants justice for the abused, but society is currently having trouble finding the moral language to deal with it. And to my sadness and incredulity, so are many in the church.
Yet if we look at how Jesus used the word scandal, we find the moral weight that these evil acts carry—the weight of a millstone. Too many of those who have been abused, like the men of Boston, have walked away from the faith, psychologically unable to reconcile Jesus with his “appointed leaders.” If this doesn’t fit with what Jesus meant for it to be scandalized, good luck finding something better.
Before I continue, I have to address something that I will write more about soon. The life of a Christian in the world is supposed to be a physical parable of our understanding of the spiritual. That’s probably so much gobbledygook to you right now, but Jesus illustrates the point perfectly. He gives us a living illustration as he blurs the lines between a physical child and his born-again children. He brings the child in his midst and says that Christians should not scandalize this “little one” (meaning both believers and actual children). The point is how the church treats children ought to mimic physically how God treats his spiritual children. This is why what these church leaders have done is so heinous and infuriating. Their lives are presenting a god who rapes children and abuses women, and perhaps against their own design, their actions show that they worship such a god.
So what does Jesus say will be the fate of those who have scandalized these children? It’s dark and poetic: “it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” The fate of such a one lies in the hand of God and will, by comparison, make being dragged by the neck to the bottom of the sea a pleasing alternative.
The failure of church leadership all over the world to take sexual abuse as seriously as Jesus is heartbreaking. That some of the abusers were allowed to remain in leadership or quickly given a new leadership position after minor discipline, stupefying.
I am not here to condemn. Jesus says, “every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men” (Matthew 12:31). This is great news for all of us. The same grace that forgives us is available to these sinful leaders—let’s not stumble over the rock that is our abundantly gracious Jesus.
But we must be faithful to our Shepherd and follow biblical procedures in dealing with this. First, leaders must meet the character qualifications to maintain their positions (1 Timothy 3); these “leaders” do not. They must be removed from any and all leadership indefinitely—this also means that they should not be allowed to start a church on their own or be brought into leadership by another church.
Secondly, we need to see the churches of these leaders acting like the Corinthians when Paul pointed out their sin:
For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, but worldly grief produces death. For consider how much diligence this very thing—this grieving as God wills—has produced in you: what a desire to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what deep longing, what zeal, what justice! In every way you showed yourselves to be pure in this matter. (2 Corinthians 7:10-11)
The godly-grief stricken church will go through the discipline procedures outlined by Jesus in Matthew 18:15-20. The offender should be given an opportunity to repent (which should probably be partnered with the person turning themselves in to the authorities), and if they don’t repent, the leaders of that church should remove them from the church in hope that separation from the body of Christ to the hands of Satan would bring them back to the feet of Jesus.
When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus, and I am with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, hand that one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
. . .
I wrote to you in a letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. I did not mean the immoral people of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters; otherwise you would have to leave the world. But actually, I wrote you not to associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister and is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or verbally abusive, a drunkard or a swindler. Do not even eat with such a person. For what business is it of mine to judge outsiders? Don’t you judge those who are inside? God judges outsiders. Remove the evil person from among you. (1 Corinthians 5:4-5, 9-13)
And finally, the world needs to see the church justly bring the things that happen in dark corners into the light of Christ:
Don’t participate in the fruitless works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what is done by them in secret. Everything exposed by the light is made visible, for what makes everything visible is light. Therefore it is said:
Get up, sleeper, and rise up from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you. (Ephesians 5:11-14)
The protectors of these dark acts are not exposing these situations. The church doesn’t have to publish it to the world—for Paul’s logic above is that exposure is rather the bringing of the presence of Christ into the situation, but in the presence of Christ there is repentance or judgment. And if there is no repentance, there must be a cutting off of the unfruitful, dying branch. That means excommunication, which is the church’s unified pronouncement that a person has not received the grace of Christ and is outside of salvation.
For the sake of the global church, more of this should be going on. We must take these abuses as seriously as Jesus.
Lord, grant us repentance and unity in your love, not in sin, and let our justice imitate your perfect justice.
Paul understood that what we do on earth, especially in the church, ought to reveal physically what is happening spiritually. He applied this thinking when he said that if we receive spiritual benefits from others, they ought to receive material benefits from us: “If we have sown spiritual things for you, is it too much if we reap material benefits from you?” (1 Corinthians 9:11). And so, if you have received spiritual benefit from my newsletter, would you consider subscribing? But not so fast. If you do not yet give to your local church, then do that instead.
Not to mention the whole stigma in the church about “wokeness.” If I had hair, I’d pull it out over the thought of people who would reject the investigation into church sexual abuse because it appears too politically liberal.